Jason, Do you mean you want the servlet to run by itself? You could pass it a mock request and response. But then it would function as a regular class and not a servlet. What are you trying to accomplish?

>> Do you mean you want the servlet to run by itself? >> You could pass it a mock request and response.

Hi Jeanne, I'm actually cross-posting for a fellow developer from the Portland Java Users Group. Essentially, he is doing what you describe -- trying to treat a servlet as a class, but not as you would expect when using a mock req/res approach -- usally (my understanding) is that it is for testing.

He actually wants the servlet to do useful work (processing a some data or something via an Ant script -- it gets convoluted to my way of thinking.. ) anyway.. I was just wondering if there was any practical examples of this being done -- and hence my hammering a nail with a screwdriver analogy.

Servlets depend on the servlet container for a LOT of services, so faking the servlet container environment would be a waste of time. Instead, move all the functionality into a "helper" class that can run in both the servlet container and normal application environment. Incidently that is a great way to test and debug during servlet development. For example, the request getParameterMap() method returns all of the request parameter values in String[] keyed by parameter name. You can easily create an identical map as input to a method in a non-servlet environment. Bill

I’ve looked at a lot of different solutions, and in my humble opinion Aspose is the way to go. Here’s the link: http://aspose.com